Easy How to Draw a Poppy Tutorial and Poppy Coloring Page
Below you’ll find an easy step-by-step tutorial for how to draw a Poppy and a Poppy Coloring Page, the symbol of Memorial and Remembrance Day. This lesson shows students how to draw the flower in three stages of bloom.
Drawing of a Poppy
Students that are honoring Remembrance Day in Canada, and Memorial Day in the States, now have some help in learning how to draw a poppy. It has come to symbolize both holidays.
The poppy’s origin as a popular symbol of remembrance lies in the landscapes of the First World War. It began with a poem written by a World War I brigade surgeon. He was struck by the sight of the red flowers growing on a ravaged battlefield and wrote a poem about it.
The poppy continues to be sold worldwide to raise money and to remember those who lost their lives in the First World War and in the following conflicts.
A poppy flower is unique in that the petals rotate around the center. This tutorial shows students how to draw them so that they can easily add them without having to erase any overlapping lines. Less erasing always makes for a neater drawing, and brighter colors.
Getting Started with Drawing Guides
The best way to get students off to a good start to any drawing lesson is to show them how to use guides as a reference point.
You may have noticed that all of the tutorials on this site have a dashed line running through the center of each step, in both horizontal and vertical directions. If students make their own centered lines on their own paper, before drawing, they will have an easy reference to follow.
For instance, as seen in Step 1 below, the flower center needs to start on the left side of the centered line. It’s important to get that shape in a good size and place, before adding the petals around it.
Drawing skills are all about getting the size and placement of lines on paper, so having some visual reference point to get started, will always help anyone learn how to be a little more accurate.
So does that mean students need to get out a ruler to draw a big fat line down the center of their paper before they start? Goodness no, please don’t! That will most likely be hard to erase and distract from any finished art. No, simply fold the sheet of paper in half both ways, make a crease, and unfold. The beauty is that by the time the drawing is done and colored in, the creases will disappear.
And now, on to the poppy drawing project.
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Poppy Coloring Page
Materials for a Poppy Drawing
Step by Step Directions to Draw a Poppy
Time needed: 45 minutes.
Draw a Poppy
- Start by drawing the center of the poppy.
- Add a petal to the right of the center.
- Draw a petal on the top.
- Add a petal to the left side.
- Finish the bloom by drawing a petal on the bottom.
- Start the side view poppy with a stem and two petals.
- Add petals to the top of the that flower.
- Finish drawing the stems and the leaves.
- Trace the drawing with a marker and color.
Draw a Poppy Plant Tutorial
Thanks so much for that Mike! That really tells much more of a story, and I hope lots of teachers chose to include that too.
Wonderful post! Thanks so much. Here’s the poem you reference “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian WWI medical corps officer John McCrae who died tending to the wounded soon after penning it. Beloved poem of Canadians everywhere and one that never fails to make me tear up when read at school assemblies and veterans’ ceremonies. Throw in a bagpiper playing “Taps” and I am a puddle of tears….
In Flanders Fields
BY JOHN MCCRAE
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Best,
Mike
Richmond, BC